


Bluer Than Blue

by Glitteringworlds



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, MerMay, mermaid au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-12
Updated: 2018-05-12
Packaged: 2019-05-05 16:20:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14622459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glitteringworlds/pseuds/Glitteringworlds
Summary: Yasha sails off into a storm and makes a new friend. What else is there to say, it's a mermaid fic.





	Bluer Than Blue

Molly had always said she was luckier on cloudy days. “Something down there must like you,” he’d joke, swirling his hand at the dark water. “Something nasty, if I had to bet.”

Yasha had thought it was a joke, at least, though Molly’s cryptic statements about the ocean often had the slightest bit of sincerity that made the hairs on her back of her neck stand up. She didn’t believe in monsters lurking under the waves, but she respected the waves themselves, as much as someone with a death wish could.

That was another one of Molly’s clever turns of phrase.

But it was true, Yasha pushed things further than most, risked waters that made most of her fellows shake their heads and turn home. A day of fishing wasn’t worth dying for. A shipment could wait. A sightseer could be told to sit out the storm.

But not Yasha. She let the others think it was just stubbornness. In truth, the water seemed to call to her, on days like that, windy and wet and cold, when the grey of the sea and the grey of the sky formed a seamless horizon that beckoned for her, her and her too-small boat, her and her wood and cloth and muscles that meant so little against the current.

Luck was bound to catch up with her eventually. She’d stayed out longer than she should have, or maybe she hadn’t been tracking her position relative to the shore - it didn’t matter. All that mattered was one moment she’d been working as she always did, and the next moment, she was lost. The wind was picking up, and the creaking of her boat, usually so familiar, felt new, dissonant, wrong.

Even as she struggled for control, there was something like peace in her mind, a comfortable blankness. She screamed into the rain, but there was no controlling it. She might as well have been adrift on a plank of wood.

The water took her in its freezing arms, and for a second, the world stilled, and slowed. There was only the deep, deep silence of the ocean, and memories of softer times - the ocean at night, the way the waves would sometimes seem almost to sing to her on those quiet evening, the gifts it would leave on the shore for her -

Lips on her lips broke Yasha from her reverie. Lips, and warmth, and a presence, but most of all, air. Breath. Ice in her burning lungs, sweet and cool, rushing in from those lips, that warmth. The presence of someone else, pulling her up.

Yasha opened her eyes. The person in front of her, and Yasha knew she was a person, as strange as she seemed, had eyes of amethyst that shone out from the darkness. Her skin was blue, and her hair was blue, and the long, scaly tail that propelled them upwards was blue too.

Clinging to the woman with all the strength she had left, Yasha pulled herself into the kiss, held on to the breath and air and life of those blue lips.

Only when they surfaced, the sound of raging winds breaking through the calm underwater silence, did Yasha pull away, gasping. Her hair was wet and heavy across her face, but quick blue fingers moved it away, warm on her cheeks and forehead.

“Why are you out here?”

The voice was melodic, and clear as a bell. 

Yasha’s voice felt hoarse and too loud as she shouted a reply. “It’s my job.”

The woman shook her head, strands of hair flying out as she did. “No one else is here! But I’ve seen you come out in storms before. I’ve watched you on the beach at night. You seem very lonely.”

The woman was naked, Yasha realized, naked and still holding her afloat, her body pressed up against Yasha’s.

Whatever words she had been managing to scrape together dissolved as Yasha became suddenly concerned about where she should put her hands, in a situation like this. Her arms were still wrapped around the woman, one hand on the square of her back, the other on her shoulder.

The woman didn’t seem to notice, her face close to Yasha’s as she seemed to studied it with intense curiosity.

“I’m going to take you to shore now,” the woman said abruptly. 

“Who are you?” The words slipped out before Yasha had thought about them, and the woman smiled broadly, an irrepressible grin. 

“You can call me Jester. And you are Yasha, right? I hear the other sailors talking about you sometimes.”

“Yeah,” Yasha said quietly. And then, louder. “Yeah, that’s me.”

“Will you come back and visit me?” Jester still hadn’t moved, though Yasha noticed her playing with the white ends of Yasha’s hair. “We can’t stay in the storm forever.” She sounded almost wistful.

“I… how?” It was completely unreasonable, in the middle of a storm, asking a mermaid how she could come visit. But it seemed important to Jester, and for some reason that made it feel important to Yasha too.

“The next clear night, on the same beach as usual. Come out to the rocks.” Jester began to swim as she talked, her arm looped gently around Yasha’s waist. “I’ll wait for you. Even if we aren’t supposed to.”

There was so much Yasha wanted to ask, wanted to know, but she just watched the water, watched the shore come into view in front of them.

It would all feel like a dream by the morning. Maybe it was one.

Yasha swore to herself, silently, and then out loud. “I’ll tell Molly. I’ll tell Molly and he’ll make sure I come.”

“Who?”

“Someone who will make sure I don’t trust my common sense too much.”

They were quiet most of the way to shore, though Yasha thought she heard Jester humming, now and then, through the wind, her voice sweet and high and almost familiar.

Only once they got to shallow water did she let go of Yasha’s waist. The water was calm here, in the curve of the bay, not far from the beach.

“You promise you will come?” Jester held out a hand, pinky out, a somewhat sheepish look on her face.

“I, uh.” Yasha took Jester’s pink in her own, shaking her head. “Sure.”

In a flash, Jester darted forward, quick and colorful as a fish on a summer day, placing a kiss on Yasha’s cheek. “Good,” she whispered, and it sounded like the ocean in a shell.

And then she was gone.

* * *

“Of course. Of  _course_  you got a mermaid to fall in love with you,” Molly would say later, when Yasha told the story. “I should have known, really.”

It didn’t matter how she protested, or that she only half-believed it had happened. He smirked all same.

And Yasha knew she’d be there, at the rocks, the first chance she had.

Scanning the waters for something bluer than blue.

**Author's Note:**

> This is inspired by a [very good fanart](https://nicodranas.tumblr.com/post/173684000202/look-my-dudes-its-mermay-and-laura-and-ashley) that got me to sit down an type out a 1000 word mermay fic in something of a gay fever dream.


End file.
